Event: A Novel

by David L. Golemon

  As the soldiers and Event Group members stood stunned, the third Excalibur caught the other animal as it came from a roundabout direction from the first two. They were silent at first, then they collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. They had been saved, at least for the moment, by something none of them ever knew existed, a lightweight, forty-pound artillery shell with a brain the size of Einstein. It was a new sword for the working soldier called Excalibur. But they also couldn’t know there were only three hundred rounds in the entire American arsenal. And that the three Paladins had only fifty on hand.

  Fielding was pleased as he watched the attack and knew the pilots in the Blackhawks were satisfied as they swept down to evacuate the team on the ground.

  “My God, that was impressive,” Virginia Pollock said at his side.

  “Yeah, it’s too bad we only have forty-seven more rounds, and those will be used to save the lives of any more survivors down there.” He looked at Virginia. “We’re going to need a lot more than a few experimental artillery shells to survive this day.”

  “Well, the engineers that my boss requested are here, and so is the president’s special gift. They’re drilling as we speak.

  Fielding removed his helmet and rubbed his forehead. “God, I hope those murdering bastards cooperate and head to the exit door.”

  Sarah watched as two Delta Force men stabbed the darkness ahead with their powerful lights. The tunnel was wide, almost like that of a large concrete storm drain. Sarah chipped away part of the wall and looked it over in the light.

  “This has been compacted, that’s why there’s no excess dirt from the tunneling, only at the surface. It’s literally compressing the soil as it drives through the ground,” she said, looking from the sample to the man next to her.

  The hole was hot and humid and smelled badly of rotting meat and sweat. They had been traveling downward for the past hour and forty-five minutes and had to stop and breathe the clean air supplied by their oxygen tanks. Now two point men waved them forward, and once again they started moving.

  Suddenly one of the men held up a hand and made a fist, then opened it and gestured for them to lie low. He then waved for Sarah to come forward.

  “What is it?” she asked in a low tone.

  “Listen, sounds like a freight train,” the Delta sergeant said.

  Sarah placed a gloved hand to the smooth wall, then she removed her helmet with her other hand and listened.

  “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way,” the commando said in a whisper.

  “And coming fast,” added Sarah as she stepped back from the wall and removed the safety on the XM8, making the deadly automatic ready to fire.

  The remaining thirteen members of her team did the same. They took up various positions for defense, using the four-man pack defense they had discussed. The one thing they did that was exactly the same was to point their weapons at the far wall as the vibration grew lou4er in the tunnel. Dirt and sand started to slowly come off the roof of the unnatural cave in soft splatters, then in whole chunks.

  “It has to be the mother” Sarah said softly, almost speaking to herself. “It’s too damn big to be the smaller ones. Look at the VDF, it’s off the scale.”

  As quickly as the vibration started, it stopped. Whatever was on the other side of the tunnel wall was only feet from where they were standing. Sarah and the others could feel it, it was a palpable thing. Most of the soldiers brought their automatic weapons up to eye level, focusing on the spot. As they did, the vibration and noise of the displacement of soil began again, coming closer. It seemed to have turned their way and was coming on in small advances. They felt it in their feet first, then the vibration caused by the movement traveled up their calves to the thighs. Then it stopped. As they watched the wall, small pieces began to fall. They were still and quiet.

  “Hear it?” Sarah whispered. “It’s right there,” pointing the muzzle of her weapon to her right. “It’s definitely the mother.”

  Suddenly a roar shook the air and brought an avalanche of dirt and rock down upon them. Then the noise started growing fainter. It was moving away, back up the mountain.

  “What the hell?” the Delta sergeant asked. “Why didn’t she attack?”

  “I don’t know. This thing has to have senses that should have felt our heartbeats through the soil. It should have attacked.”

  Suddenly a horrible thought crossed Sarah’s mind as she was shaking dirt off herself and she froze. They had been briefed on the animal and how it would adapt to whatever it was up against. Now that, coupled with the fact it was heading away from the desert floor and traveling up the mountain, seared the answer to the sergeant’s question in her mind. Not only was it going after a bigger target, it was going after the target that was controlling the fight against it and its offspring: the crash site and all the support personnel gathered there. The thought of Lisa, Virginia, and the unsuspecting Event teams working at the site raced through her mind. She quickly hit the transmit switch on her radio, hooked to her web gear at her side.

  “Site One, come in. Site One, come in!” she said loudly into the mike just inches from her mouth.

  The other members of her tunnel team quickly realized what she was thinking. The sergeant grabbed Sarah by the arm and turned her roughly as they started running back the way they had come. They knew down to a man they had been outmaneuvered.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Superstition Mountains, Arizona

  July 9, 1610 Hours’

  Lisa sat in the communications tent with Virginia. They had heard little in the last few minutes, and from what they had monitored, a massive slaughter was obviously taking place beneath the surface of the earth. Lisa had tried for forty minutes to recall all the tunnel teams after the initial attack just outside one of the town holes. But thus far, she hadn’t been able to raise a single team. Being deep underground was taxing the systems they currently had. As usual, the army had delayed sending the more reliable M-2786 radios out from Fort Carson, radios that were in use in caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. Lisa wished now they had at least had time to run antenna relays throughout the tunnels; they could have been placed as the troops went deeper, like bread crumbs. Now the softball-sized ground-penetrating radar units were not furnishing anything on the animals’ movements as they had obviously caught on to the attacks and moved deeper under the ground, thus defeating the weak signals of the small units.

  “S… t… ne, Si… One, come… !”

  The static was cutting off whoever was calling. Lisa took a chance.

  “This is Site One. Repeat, this is Site One, over.”

  “Get the hell… o… of there, the mother… heading… way.”

  “That sounded like Sarah,” Virginia said.

  Lisa didn’t wait as she clearly understood the broken message. She threw off the headset and ran for the front of the tent. She hit a large red button on the way out that had been mounted to the main support pole, and a Klaxon started sounding throughout the crash site.

  Colonel Sam Fielding was standing on a rock with field glasses pointing toward the valley floor when the alarm started. He immediately jumped from his perch and ran to organize the Event staff and remaining Rangers and Airborne personnel.

  The state troopers or what remained of them drew their nine millimeters again and started scanning the area.

  Gus grabbed Mahjtic and heard him say one word in a frightened voice with its eyes larger than normal: “Destroyer!”

  Lisa grabbed an M16 from the arms locker and started back for the COMM tent. On the way she yelled at the remaining state troopers, “Get your asses over here and get something with a little more kick to it than those potato guns!”

  They all immediately ran for the arms locker where Lisa had been a moment before. Trooper Dills arrived first and grabbed for an M79 grenade launcher. He smiled as he hefted a bandolier of grenades over his shoulder, saying, “Payback is a motherfucker!”

  Fielding slammed into the COMM tent
and yelled, “Get the goddamn Apaches up here, now!”

  Lisa immediately put the M16 down beside the radio gear and started calling for reinforcements. Everyone from the White House situation room, Nellis, and the Event Center, to a few of the newly surfaced and severely damaged tunnel teams, heard Lisa’s call for assistance.

  The remaining Event staff were starting to run from the saucer’s crash area to the tent site. Before most of them made it clear of the debris field, the ground rumbled beneath their feet and a high-pitched whine came to their ears. Suddenly, the ground exploded in the middle of the site, and the large, thick-haired form of the mother burst from the hole, sending pieces of the broken saucer flying in all directions, with some of the debris striking a few of the technicians, knocking them from their feet. The large beast roared, flaring her neck armor, and immediately went on the attack.

  Virginia ran out of the tent in time to see Dr. Thorsen from the anthropology department picked up and torn in two by the massive animal. He was ripped like a rag doll and tossed aside. But still she couldn’t bring herself to look away. The brutal life-form was horrible, but still a mesmerizing sight to the scientist in her.

  The mother quickly grabbed two of the staff as they tried to dodge the towering beast. The mouth opened and the mandibles worked at an incredible speed, almost undetectable. The tail swiped at another doctor as she ran the opposite way, sinking the stinger deep into her back. As the barbed tip pulled free, it took with it most of her coverall and about eight inches of flesh. She collapsed and her skin instantaneously shriveled and collapsed in on the bone, as her insides, including the hard muscles, were reduced to jelly by the alien’s venom.

  The team member it held in its right claw was dispatched quickly with a bite to the top of his head as it casually tossed the man aside. It threw the other scientist against an outcropping of rock, smashing most of the bones in his body.

  After the initial shock of seeing the parent and its size for the first time, the few Rangers, Airborne, and Arizona State troopers opened fire on the animal. It easily dodged most of the flying bullets, and most of the projectiles that hit ricocheted harmlessly away after striking the hardened chest plates of the beast. The Talkhan sidestepped Dills’s grenades as it leapt into the air and sank into the soil. It surfaced again in the center of the gathered policemen to quickly seize three troopers, one in its maw, the other two in its huge claws as they cried out in sudden pain, then disappeared with the beast below the surface. The others watched; a few, out of frustration, fired into the sand and rock in which men and animal had vanished.

  Fielding grabbed a few of the remaining 101st personnel and set up a perimeter around the command tents. It seemed as if an hour had passed, when it had actually been only a moment since the attack had begun. Finally they heard the sound of rotors as the Apaches fought for altitude and climbed the mountain.

  The ground once again exploded as the beast breached the surface twenty feet in front of the command tents. Fielding saw it first and fired a burst into the animal. The bullets bounced harmlessly off the armored chest and side as the Talkhan swiped at him. Dills quickly saw an opening and, without aiming, fired a grenade from the M79. The round exploded at the animal’s feet, and it quickly turned and jumped through the air, landing in front of the state trooper, swiping at his chest and driving him to the ground, snapping ribs and breaking one arm. Fielding saw the animal’s amazing leap and ran forward, still firing the M16. It swiped at Dills’s prone form, claws barely scraping through his shirt as it missed. Then Virginia screamed as Fielding fired more rounds into the creature’s back. It forgot about Dills as two of the bullets found the mark between the two plates that protected the animal’s shoulder blades. It roared in pain and confusion as it turned from Dills and swiped at Fielding’s still form. The huge claws easily separated the muscle, sinew, and vertebrae of the colonel’s neck, sending his head flying thirty yards to strike the side of the forensics tent. The Talkhan immediately dove into the earth, again creating a soil eruption that covered most of Dills’s agonized body. Then they all saw the wave as it sped for the COMM tent. As they watched, the battle started up again in the huge command enclosure, with Lisa-facing the Destroyer of Worlds, alone.

  Gus grabbed Matchstick into his arms and ran for their tent opening. The sight that met his eyes stopped him in his tracks. Bodies were lying everywhere, mutilated and smashed, crumpled and discarded as easily as one would toss away dirty clothes. As he was looking at the scene of slaughter, the whine and zing of bullets sounded in his ears, bringing back memories of his taking fire in Korea. And then he remembered what he’d wanted to do back then and couldn’t. But now he could, he thought. The bullets barely missed him as they thumped into the tent flap. He ducked and ran in the direction of the crash site. Mahjtic, sensing the thoughts of the old man, said, “Bug out, bug out, beat feet!”

  The animal came straight up through the ground and into the tent’s plywood flooring. Lisa was lifted up into the air as the wood cracked and separated. As she hit the ground hard, landing on her back, knocking the wind from her lungs, she came face-to-face with the mother as it roared, shaking its head and sending her mane flaring and slicing through the sides of the tent. She roared again, sending spittle mixed with the blood of Lisa’s comrades to soak Lisa’s fatigues and face. The animal cocked its massive head and looked with hate-filled eyes at the weak creature staring up at her arrogantly.

  Lisa stood stock-still, looking directly at the animal as it stood before her. Drool slowly fell from its open mouth as it leaned forward toward the diminutive human. Lisa swallowed as the creature seemed to be looking her over, possibly smelling her. Her right hand slowly started reaching for the M16 that was caught between an upturned desk and a support pole.

  It suddenly and deftly reached down and plucked Lisa up in both of its massive hands, its claws digging deep into her sides and back, and Lisa screamed in pain and anger. The mother Talkhan roared again as it looked at the woman in her clutches. Lisa yelled right back, partly in terror, but mostly because she knew her death was imminent and she was angry. With great effort against the pain, she worked her right arm free and grabbed for the nine millimeter in her shoulder holster. Seeing this, the Talkhan squeezed, sending two of the sharpened claws deeper and puncturing one of Lisa’s lungs, as it brought her toward its gaping, mandible-snapping, tooth-filled mouth.

  As blood flowed freely from Lisa’s lips, she weakly brought the pistol up and fired three times in quick succession into the beast’s face. She was so weak by now the recoil after each round almost made her lose her grip on the pistol. One of the nine-millimeter rounds caught the raging animal in the right eye, knocking its head back and making it reach for its wounded face. The claws of the right hand severed a main artery in Lisa’s stomach as they tore through her body and the screaming mother dropped her to the floor. It covered the wounded eye and roared, shaking the ground and rippling the tent as if an internal wind had erupted. The Destroyer then shook its head and brought the powerful tail up, and instead of stinging Lisa, it smashed the tail into her skull with bone-breaking accuracy. It repeatedly slammed the tail down, trying to obliterate the small creature that had caused it so much pain and anguish. It finished by repeatedly stabbing the now mangled body with its stinger, sinking the barbed tip deeply into the naval signalman’s remains.

  As the Talkhan stood glaring one-eyed at Lisa’s body, the tent suddenly erupted as hundreds of thirty-millimeter rounds exploded into the interior. A number of the armor-piercing shells found their mark, neatly punching holes into the mother. It roared in pain and stumbled forward toward the opening. Then another two rounds exploded into its shoulder and upper chest. It screamed in outrage again as it leaped and dove into the earth just outside the tent, taking most of the canvas front panel of the communications and command enclosure into the hole with it.

  The three Apaches circled the camp and saw nothing but broken and lifeless bodies. Their thirty-millimeter ch
ain guns turned and scanned the area of the crash site. Here and there men and women slowly stood and shook themselves off. Most were half-deaf from the loud explosions brought to bear by the attack helicopters.

  Sarah had a horrible feeling. They had been unable to raise the crash site for the last half an hour, as they sprinted through the tunnel and up the mountain. Suddenly the radio crackled in her earpiece as they came shallow.

  “I repeat, tunnel missions canceled, over.”

  Sarah bit her lower lip as she realized it hadn’t been Lisa on the radio. But she couldn’t wonder about her friend’s fate just now.

  “We have movement!” shouted one of the point men with the VDF device.

  They stopped and the entire team brought their weapons up, and the laser sights pierced the darkness and ran off into the blackness settling on nothing. They waited. Finally, they saw movement, and then the old man suddenly appeared moving fast down the tunnel. He didn’t notice at first he was being targeted as several laser sights settled on Mahjtic’s wide eyes.

  “Sonsbeeeech, Guss, sonssssabeeeeches, don’t shooooooot. Gus and Maaahjtic!” the small being cried, covering its head and burying its face into Gus’s chest.

  Gus threw his one free arm into the air, turning to the side to protect Matchstick the best he could. “Whoa there, get them laser beams off us!” Gus called out breathlessly.

  “Mr. Tilly, what in the hell are you doing down here?” Sarah asked as she lowered the submachine gun.

  “Escaping little missy.” He placed his other arm around Mahjtic once again and hefted him higher onto his chest. “I guess no one told you. We just got our asses kicked up there,” Gus said, nodding upward.